Sharon Wright

Sharon is an international expert in welfare reform and the marketisation of employment services. Her research specialism is in analysing British welfare reforms in international and comparative perspective. Her current research uses in-depth qualitative methods to:

•understand lived experiences of welfare reform in relation to concepts of ‘agency’;

•assess the ethics and effectiveness of ‘welfare conditionality’ in theory, policy and practice; and

•analyse how changes to both policy content and governance (e.g. marketisation and decentralisation) impact on front-line advisers and benefit recipients.

Sharon’s work also contributes to understandings of what poverty means to people in the context of social divisions and inequalities of income and wealth, particularly in the context of post-devolution Scotland.